Colorado election officials and Front Range Passenger Rail District leaders are in a bureaucratic quagmire after a communication failure caused four counties to send ballots that erroneously contained Issue 7A to roughly 800,000 voters starting late last week.

State election officials sent guidance to the affected county clerks — Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld — late Wednesday on how to properly count the ballots, and election officials have pledged that only votes cast by those who are eligible to vote on Issue 7A will be counted.

And while former election officials and law experts who spoke to The Denver Post on Thursday disagreed about the severity of the problem, all agreed the scale of the error is unheard of.

“I am not aware of anything anywhere remotely near this magnitude occurring,” former Secretary of State Wayne Williams said. “You’re not talking about a few voters or a couple ballots that were in error, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands.”

State and Front Range Passenger Rail District officials confirmed the error on Wednesday after learning that hundreds of thousands of ballots were printed to include Issue 7A, which asks voters to approve a sales tax increase to fund the expansion of the Colorado Connector, despite those voters not living within the district and not being eligible to vote on the measure.

The error is connected to a 2026 law that changed the boundaries of the district to include only certain cities and towns along the proposed rail line. Updated information about the district boundaries never made its way to some county election officials, but accounts of how the communication breakdown happened vary.

El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker said he emailed the Front Range Passenger Rail District in July to request updated district boundaries ahead of the election and never heard back. The Denver Post reviewed a copy of the email Schleiker sent to the district’s general information inbox on July 23.

Schleiker’s office eventually assigned boundaries to Issue 7A based on guidance from the 2026 legislation, Senate Bill 172, and used the municipal boundaries already in the county system, Schleiker said.

Rail district general manager Sal Pace said the agency did not have a record of Schleiker’s email, but acknowledged not responding was an oversight.

Front Range Passenger Rail District staff met with the Colorado County Clerk’s Association and “a number” of county clerks in March about the boundary changes and followed up in April, Pace said.

The Colorado County Clerk’s Association did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday and Thursday.

Doug Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said he can’t think of any similar ballot errors in Colorado. Usually county clerks know about changes to the ballot, like if a candidate withdraws at the last minute, he said.

“This is just a disorganized miscommunication and a mess,” Spencer said. “But I don’t think it undermines democracy or calls into question how these systems run.”

If anything, the mistake will add to rhetoric around election and ballot security, Spencer said. Federal officials in the Trump administration have repeatedly criticized and worked to limit mail-in voting.

“This is really unfortunate because this isn’t actually a problem, it’s a bureaucratic snafu that won’t have an effect on the outcome but will give fuel to the argument that mail-in ballots are insecure,” he said.

However, the system worked in finding the error before votes were counted, Spencer added.

Williams — who lost reelection to current Secretary of State Jena Griswold in 2018 — said Griswold’s office bears some responsibility for the error and should have reached out to county clerks about the district boundary changes.

“There’s a basic level of following the legal requirement and then there’s being proactive, addressing issues and being aware of things,” Williams said. “That’s the higher level we have the right to expect from people at the state.”

A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office did not respond to an email seeking an interview with Griswold or a question about whether the agency communicated with county clerks about the rail district boundary changes.

In a letter to the county clerks in Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld counties on Wednesday night, state election officials said most ballots will be processed normally because voting systems will be able to tell which ballots should be counted for Issue 7A and which should not.

A small number of ballots in Bow Mar and Sterling Ranch may need to be counted by hand because of issues with different ballot styles. Those who voted on Issue 7A but were not eligible to do so will have their ballots duplicated onto the correct ballot style, state officials said.

“We will support the counties to identify this group and make sure they follow the appropriate processes,” agency officials said.

Pace on Thursday sought to redirect the conversation to what the district says passenger rail could correct, pointing to a Denver Regional Council of Governments estimate that increasing vehicle congestion in metro Denver will eventually cause rush hour to start at 2 p.m., rather than 5 p.m.

“That’s why we have to do something about it,” he said. “That’s why we have to put our head down and focus on the mission at hand.”

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